The constant presence of that severe and overpowering figure, "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God," checks the native wildness of imagination, restricts the exuberance of fancy, and sets a rigorous limit to invention.

Diderot used to admit that the _genre serieux_ could never take its right place until it had been handled by a man of high dramatic genius.

The cause why this condition has never come to pass is simply that its whole structure and its regulations repel the faculties of dramatic genius.
Besides the perfection of the _genre serieux_, Diderot insisted that the following tasks were also to be achieved before the stage could be said to have attained the full glory of the other arts.

First, a domestic or bourgeois tragedy must be created.

Second, the conditions of men, their callings and situations, the types of classes, in short, must be substituted for mere individual characters.